A Manhattan teenager with no criminal record is suing the city for $1 million because cops arrested and taunted him as "Plaxico Burress" after he got shot in a robbery. Christian Dudley doesn't even own a gun, but that didn't matter to the officers who collared him after the Harlem mugging earlier this year. He was arrested in a Washington Heights hospital where he was waiting to get the bullet removed from the back of his knee—instead of surgery, he got dragged to the precinct on a charge of criminal possession of a weapon. And that's where the fun really started.
"As soon as I went into the precinct and I had the cuffs on they said, 'Oh, is this Plaxico?'" Dudley tells the Daily News. "And then when I was in the cell, while they processed me, they called me Plaxico, making fun of me...It was the worst experience ever. I was treated as a suspect when I was a victim." Police summoned to the hospital had decided that because there was no bullet hole in Dudley's pants, he must have shot himself accidentally, in the same way NFL player Plaxico Burress shot himself with a gun in his waistband. Elementary!
But Dudley insists his baggy pants had slipped down during the mugging. His lawyer calls the possession charge, which was later dropped, "Outrageous. They created this cockamamie theory with no evidence." The lawsuit charges that in addition to the humiliation, the immediate arrest prevented Dudley from getting the bullet removed from his leg.
